Sean,
$$?? And from where?
Little amenities like??:
NIC, WiFi
How much RAM?
Size of HDD?
See:
http://webshop.fujitsupc.com/fpc/Ecommerce/buildseriesbean.do?series=P2
for full details. I got the 20 gig base model; I already have an
802.11 pc card etc but you can get integrated wifi, and all of them
come with 256 megs RAM (can go to 384), firewire, ethernet, modem,
etc. The built-in wifi is sexy though if you don't already have a
wifi card, or just want to pay for the sexiness. 20 gigs is a bit
small perhaps, but I have a monster desktop machine as my main
system, this is purely for walkabout.
I ordered mine from PCConnection; a search of the web seemed to
indicated pricing controls are in effect, everyone was selling the
20 gig version for $1499. So I used PCC and got it about 12 hours
after ordering it -- gods I love that. I live in CA so avoiding
sales tax is a good thing.
Compared to the small sony/toshiba laptops it's way cheap and very
complete.
I have a 1 gig MD and 512 mb Transcend card. I'm just switching
over to CF but I have a small MP3 player I'll use the MD in, and
the MD will be backup storage in case something goes wrong with the
CF card.
Two weeks of my trip is going to be spent on liveaboard dive boats
(that is, a dive cruise) far from land. This matters because I do a
dive, snap away for an hour, come up for a break. During that hour
or so I need to change batteries and backup images -- the CF has to
be big enough to not run dry during the dive, but it gets offloaded
regularly so I don't need to bring enough to last all day. Though
honestly on a hike topside I rarely take more than 200 shots, while
u/w I can blow through more than 100 in a single dive very easily.
All you need is one visit from a pod of dolphins or a really
cooperative turtle!
I may be doing a lot of this sort of travel in the near future, so
it made sense to gear up for it.
How do you plan to transport your laptop?
Not sure just yet. I had planned to take my backpack camera bag as
my carry on, but I'm not sure if I get a second carry on if I do
that or if the camera bag can hold everything else I need to bring.
I may have to do some shopping for a new bag to get everything in
there right. But in general I have a smallish carryon bag with an
internal zipper pocket that the laptop fits into. It's a nice size.
Interesting note on these firewire laptops; they support firewire
networking. Haven't tried it with my desktop yet that'd be sweet.
My old Sony also supported this.
The only hestitation I had making the buy decision was the
transmeta CPU, but so far it seems to work very well, plays DVDs
fine, runs fast enough for what I need it for. Timing tests I found
online indicate the transmeta runs about like a PIII at the same
clockspeed
except for floating point, which is a lot slower.
Well, I'm not going to use it for 3d rendering or Excel, so I don't
care about FP.
Notably it doesn't get super-hot like my PIII Sony laptop used to.
Runs very cool indeed, and battery life seems good, but I'll
probably get the beefier main battery. The stock battery is very
tiny and despite marketing claims runs about 2 hours. I still need
to pop a DVD in and see what battery life is like watching a movie.
One thing; do NOT install MS Office 2000 on this if you get it with
Win XP. That cause a very wierd problem with coming back from sleep
mode -- the screen would not turn back on; some driver got whacked
by the Office installer. As I don't really need office on my laptop
I opted to just remove it. That's the only software issue I've run
into; 3rd party stuff is all very happy. I've installed and run
photoshop, debabelizer, roxio, WinDVD, winamp (2.7.2 because I
don't like 3), the drivers to talk to my little MP3 player device,
and some other stuff I can't recall, no problems.
Hope that helps!
--
http://www.seanansorge.com
